A Letter to Ann Pelo

EDIT: I should preface this by saying that i really did appreciate the article. I think it's wonderfully thought-provoking and a fascinating subject. Don't read my rebuttal without reading the article first.

I stumbled across your article "Why We Banned Legos" recently, and i have to say, it bothered me somewhat. I'm not disagreeing with the original assessment that there may have been some disparity in the "fair use" of the Legos between the older and younger children, but the solution seems to me rather socialist and frankly, boring. In particular, i take offense to the statement near the end of the article, "All structures will be standard sizes."

Let me back up a few steps to explain myself better. The whole experiment is supposedly about "exploring power, ownership, and equity" but it seems to me that all you've done is restructured the location of power from the older children to yourselves (the teachers). This may not, in itself, be a bad thing. It certainly allows you to encourage a more "fair" use of the Legos; inasmuch as fair means "equal access to materials." Thus far, i have absolutely no objections. I fully support the opportunity for all the children to create as they will. With one caveat -- the "group of eight children that conceived and launched Legotown" invested time and effort to begin a project -- intellectual capital, if you will. After Legotown's initial destruction, though, this investment was stripped from them and given to the rest of the class. Hardly fair, considering that the rest of the class did not contribute to its original construction.

This is socialism, pure and unfiltered (value judgments aside, it most certainly is). In theory, this should benefit the entire community, but in practice it disenfranchises the students who were entrepreneurial enough to begin something new in your school. In time, given enough similar cues, they will conclude that it is unproductive to invest time and energy into ideas that they themselves will not benefit from, preferring instead to reap the benefits of the work of others. In Sweden, following the economic crisis of the 1990s resultant of this type of policy, this schema played out to its eventual conclusion: total political reform. When less than 30% of the general population showed up to work on any given day, changes needed to be made.

Equality cannot be forced. Some people are smarter than others, more attractive, more driven to succeed. In the case of your students, some are more interested in Legos than others. I support equal access to the Legos. What i don't support is governmentalized rationing of those Legos. "We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.... We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces" says the article. Why should this be? Are there so few Legos that none are left over with 15 or 28 pieces each? Some Lego pieces are larger than others -- is it still one piece if it's a 2x4 block (verse a 1x2 block)? Are "cool pieces" worth more than one block, and can each student have only a limited number of "cool pieces?" These are subjective questions, and the disagreements about worth are simply another form of power brokering no different from the original paradigm. Moreover, why should the houses be standard sizes, especially considering the newly instituted system of 'all public buildings'? Should not the school be larger than a single-family home, perhaps constructed by more than one student?
Diversity is inequality. If one student who plays with the Legos daily happens to have amassed a larger quantity of blocks (and thus, for example, a larger house) it might inspire another student to expand his own house in inventive and unique ways. If his quota of blocks disallows such innovation, though, his creativity has been effectively quashed.

The point is, not only has this new method failed to create an equal power structure, but it has furthermore limited the creative power the Legos granted the students in the first place. In my opinion, anyway; i can only conjecture from my exterior position.